Mock jurors sit at least six feet apart with masks and other health and safety measures in place. By Jill D. Schmid, Ph.D. It was awesome to get back to conducting in-person mock trial research this past weekend!  While things looked a bit different, it still checked off all the boxes for a successful project and, as always, we gained some incredibly important insights that will help us prepare for trial. Part of the reason this project was so important is because so many attorneys are wondering if mock trial research is even possible in the coming months. The answer

By Jill D. Schmid, Ph.D. For years, I’ve successfully avoided Facetime calls and most video conferences. However, around  9 weeks, 2 days, 13 hours, and 42 minutes ago, that all changed. Not only did all of my work transition to video conferences, but so did my communication with my family and friends. Houseparty and Zoom are my new normal and I have to say, it’s not all bad! Yes, there are all the headaches we’ve known about for years: everyone talking over each other, followed by silence as everyone stops to let others continue; the frozen feed followed by everyone

By Thomas M. O’Toole, Ph.D. It is the question on every litigator’s mind: What impact, if any, will the pandemic have on jury decision-making once trials resume? Will there be more goodwill towards businesses because of the economic toll the pandemic has taken? Will perceptions of a widening rich/poor gap perpetuate social inflation and nuclear verdicts? The questions go on and on and it is important to have answers to them. I expect that many organizations will purport to have those answers, but those answers might be misleading or flat-out wrong for one very important reason. While everyone wants to

By Thomas M. O’Toole, Ph.D. As the country starts to re-open and jury trials resume, it is our job to research and understand what impact the pandemic and the stay-at-home orders that lasted over two months in some states will have on how jurors evaluate liability and damages going forward. There are many ways to approach this kind of research. For example, we just completed on of the largest surveys we have ever conducted in order to get specific answers to some of the questions we know attorneys and general counsel will have. We are currently in the process of

By Thomas M. O’Toole, Ph.D. We have officially entered the eighth week of the stay-at-home order in Washington State. Six days ago, our governor announced there would be no jury trials in the state until at least July. During this time, we have had at least a dozen cases across the country that were supposed to go to trial, but now await an uncertain future. In the next few months, we have another dozen cases that are supposed to go to trial, but those are uncertain, too, as courts will surely be dealing with enormous scheduling challenges. Fortunately, we have

*Previously published our Jury Economics column in the December 2019 issue of the King County Bar Bulletin. By Thomas M. O’Toole, Ph.D. and Kevin R. Boully, Ph.D. Do you pursue happiness in each moment or live a life to be proud of when you someday look back on it?  What does your preference say about how you make decisions? Nobel Prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman has repeatedly discussed an important discovery of human decision-making he describes as the realization of the two selves that exist in each of us. His point tackles the fundamental reality of how we experience and

*Previously published our Jury Economics column in the January 2020 issue of the King County Bar Bulletin. By Thomas M. O’Toole, Ph.D. and Kevin Boully, Ph.D. Then-Stanford Psychology graduate student Elizabeth Newton conducted a fascinating experiment over a decade ago when she divided participants into groups she dubbed “tappers” and “listeners.” The tappers were asked to select from a list of well-known Americana songs and then tap the tune for the listener assigned to sit across from them. The tappers could not say or hum anything. All they could do was tap their finger. The listener’s job was to guess

By Thomas M. O’Toole, Ph.D. How do you start a blog about what we are all going through right now? Most of us have never experienced anything like this before and making the adjustments that we are being asked to make is difficult at times. I was telling my kids earlier today that I am not sure everyone in our household is going to survive this pandemic and that has nothing to do with Coronavirus. Different parts of the United States seem to be adjusting in different ways based on the number of cases in that particular area. In Seattle,

By Thomas M. O’Toole, Ph.D. Last year, Johnson & Johnson was hit with an $8 billion verdict by a Philadelphia jury, an amount that exceeded the gross domestic product of more than sixty countries (included Monaco, Belize, and Greenland) in that same year, according to data from the International Monetary Fund. In fact, Johnson & Johnson has become the posterchild for what many in the legal industry refer to as “nuclear verdicts,” but J&J is not alone. Jury verdict awards in the hundreds of millions and billions are becoming more and more common in American trials. The impact of this

By Thomas M. O’Toole, Ph.D. If you follow this blog or read our column in the King County Bar Bulletin, you know that I have been working with another well-respected jury consultant, Kevin Boully, to develop the study of Jury Economics, which is behavioral economics applied to jury decision-making. Behavioral economics has become a critical field of study across many industries due to its focus on the predictably irrational ways in which people act and make decisions. Jury economics tells us that there are three core components to all jury decision-making: 1) it is egocentric; 2) it is economical; and